Al-Qaeda has this year suffered its biggest setbacks in Afghanistan and
Pakistan since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Gordon Brown will say on
Monday.

The Prime Minister will step up his attempts to win back public support for Britain's mission in Afghanistan, insisting that the deployment is helping to "disable" the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden.

Speaking at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in the City of London, the Prime Minister will try to offer voters a positive view of the campaign, which has so far cost the lives of 233 British service personnel.

The latest death came on Sunday, a soldier from The Rifles who was shot dead near Sangin in Helmand province.

Before the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, al-Qaeda used Afghanistan as a base for training and planning attacks. Mr Brown will say that the Western military deployment has forced the group over the border in Pakistan.

There, the Pakistani military has launched a major campaign against extremist groups. The US has also launched drone attacks over the Afghan border in an attempt to kill al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan.

The result of the Western actions has put the terrorist group on the back foot, Mr Brown will say.

“I vigorously defend our action in Afghanistan and Pakistan because al-Qaeda is today the biggest source of threat to our national security – and to the security of peoples lives in Britain,” he will say.

“I can report that more has been planned and enacted with greater success in this one year to disable al Qaeda than in any year since the original invasion in 2001.”

An opinion poll on Sunday showed that 71 per cent of British voters now back a phased withdrawal of British troops over the next year.

Mr Brown will insist that the mission must continue: “We are in Afghanistan because we judge that if the Taliban regained power al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would once more have an environment in which they could operate. We are there because action in Afghanistan is not an alternative to action in Pakistan, but an inseparable support to it”.